Post navigation

In Barcelona this week for the Mobile World Congress, where the sun is out along with teeming crowds for mobile technology’s biggest annual event–and I’m trying not to let jet lag slow me down too much.

I’ve been here (to Barcelona, though not MWC, a number of times, and never tire of the city. (A transit worker slowdown this week will leave a lot of people tired of walking and fighting for taxis, no doubt.) It’s accessible, not daunting, and friendly.

The MWC, I’m told, has been evolving rapidly–from a totally carrier dominated event to something much more open, the way CES turned from a gadget show to an everything-digital show. In fact, based on the list of exhibitors, there’s clearly a lot of overlap now.

One of the digital arenas I’m looking forward to exploring is ubiquitous computing and its cousin, the so-called “Internet of Things.” There’s almost unlimited potential to add intelligence to everything we touch, and then connect it all–and use the knowledge we gain to make our lives better, individually and in our communities. There’s equally unlimited potential for that to turn into the ultimate surveillance system, and in the several years that I’ve paid close attention to the IoT I’ve seen almost no evidence that the industry is even slightly interested in protecting our privacy beyond making a few pleasant noises in that direction.

One of the companies moving fastest in the global technology scene Huawei, which covered my travel expenses here, joining a group of tech analysts. It’s an absolutely huge Chinese tech operation, based in Shenzen, home to vast amounts of that country’s digital-gear manufacturing. The Huawei events here include the launch of some new consumer devices (I just saw the new “MateBook” 2-in-one Windows tablet/notebook with a detachable keyboard has a clean design, and is getting solid early reviews), I’ll be learning more about the company and its raft of global competitors, and plan to ask questions about how it will build security into its products. In fact, I’m planning to ask these questions of all the companies I visit when I make the rounds of the exhibition floor later this week.

Huawei, which has been mostly a business-to-business company, has big ambitions for end-user technology. One recent “design win,” as tech folks call it, was its contract with Google to make Nexus 6P phablet. I reviewed it last fall for Medium Backchannel, and was so impressed that I bought one.